Killzone: Shadow Fall graphics lead to class action lawsuit

You can file this one under “H” for “Holy crap this is stupid”. A Californian bloke called Douglas Ladore has filed a class action lawsuit against Sony, stating that Killzone: Shadow Fall had “deceptive marketing” insofar as its graphics are concerned. Ladore is alleging that Sony’s claim that the game runs at native 1080p is false, when the multiplayer portion of the game actually uses a technique that upscales the resolution from 960×1080 as opposed to 1920×1080.

The reason the multiplayer portion of Killzone: Shadow Fall does this is in order to output a higher frames per second count. The single-player portion runs in native 1080p, but at a variable frame rate. As any hardcore online shooter fan will tell you, a higher frame rate is all important. Developer Guerrilla Games employed some very clever programing in order to pull this off in the multiplayer portion; you can read about it over on Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry piece.

Clearly smelling a quick buck, Ladore’s class action lawsuit was filed with attorney firm Edelson PC. That firm is no stranger to gaming industry lawsuits and is responsible for several in the past against EA, Sony, and Gearbox for Aliens: Colonial Marines.

The class action lawsuit is seeking damages to the amount of $5 million. Crazy, isn’t it? It all comes down to Guerrilla Games’ clever rendering technique known as “temporal reprojection”. The game’s producer, Poria Torkan, explains the technique as follows:

“Temporal reprojection is a technique that tracks the position of pixels over time and predicts where they will be in future. These ‘history pixels’ are combined with freshly rendered pixels to form a higher-resolution new frame.”

According to the lawsuit, temporal reprojection is not the same as native 1080p, and Sony’s claim of “native 1080p” in all of Shadow Fall’s marketing, is false.

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